Hemingway Wouldn't Recognize it Today.

When I puzzle about the dismal state of automobile racing, the immortal words of Clark Gable, uttered in the all-time great film Gone With the Wind, come to mind: "Frankly, I don't give a damn."

I hate to admit such a thing because I have spent—or wasted—my life around motor racing: driving, promoting, and writing about what Ernest Hemingway once linked with mountain climbing and bull fighting as the only true sports. The rest, he sniffed, are merely games.

When I began writing for this magazine (not on papyrus rolls, as some would believe), the sport was exploding with energy. The Indy 500 had all manner of cars—front- and rear-engined—driven by the best American and European stars in the business. The incredible Can-Am series featured great drivers in such awesome machines as the big-block McLarens, Chaparrals, and the Porsche Turbo panzers. The Trans-Am, which I competed in for several seasons, was packed with muscle cars—Mustangs, Camaros, Challengers, Barracudas, Javelins, etc.—driven by the likes of Mark Donohue, Peter Revson, and George Follmer.

Formula 1 was leading the way with rear-engined machines, but the dreaded specter of ground-effects—which would, like nothing else, obviate the skill of the driver—was only beginning to be explored. Great drivers like Gurney, Surtees, Stewart, et al., were still able to overwhelm an automobile with sheer bravery and talent while packed into lethal machines that would happily murder their driver should he miscue.

The stock-car world of NASCAR was on the rise toward the current state where it now dominates the rest in terms of popularity. In those days, the cars—Pontiacs, Fords, Chevys, Dodges, etc.—still looked like real automobiles, unlike the cloned silhouette machines that circulate the speedways today, virtually identical save for ridiculously decaled grilles to separate the marques. They lap the big ovals with amazing speeds, seldom even sliding and only rarely crashing.

This will make you crazy in this day of political correctness, but the element of danger—and yes, even death—remains the differential between Hemingway's three sports and children's games. Some critics of racing witlessly claim that spectators only attend to see someone die. This is utter and complete nonsense. I have been at numerous races where death is present. When a driver dies, the crowd symbolically dies, too. They come to see action at the brink: ultimate risk taking and the display of skill and bravery embodied in the sport's immortals like Nuvolari, Foyt, and thousands of others who operate at the ragged edge.

Back in the dark ages when I first began to scribble this column, I claimed that technology had the potential to destroy automobile racing, that engineers and computers would ultimately create machines so perfect that the driver would become only a witless passenger. Today we are reaching that unfortunate state. With traction control, computer-operated suspensions, automatic gearboxes, sucker-like ground effects, and space-age aerodynamics, race cars can overwhelm human skill. I will wager that Michael Schumacher, the current best of the bunch, would be doomed to shame and defeat were he to trade his Ferrari for a backmarker Minardi. As skillful as he is, he would not be able to overdrive a bad machine as his fellow greats did in the pre-techno era.

With the rise of the engineers and pencil pushers who now dominate the sport have come insane and egregious increases in the cost of doing business. Millions upon millions are necessary to build and race what remains a simple four-wheel machine powered by an internal-combustion engine, both of which have been omnipresent for well over 100 years. But now, with what Mark Donohue once called "unobtanium alloys," exotic fuels, featherlight valvetrains, etc., we have powerplants that can only be afforded by a tiny cadre of mega-rich teams and, worse yet, have virtually no relationship to real-world passenger engines.

It used to be said that "automobile racing improves the breed," as horse racing does with horses. That is now nonsense. Race cars are a pointless diversion, with only the most arcane relationship to those we drive on the street.

Will a day come when our cars have carbon-fiber tubs, 18,000-rpm V-10 engines, and ground-effects tunnels? Perhaps, about the same time we have condos on the moon.

I recently attended a Rolex Grand American race at Watkins Glen. Twenty-one of the ridiculous little Daytona Prototype pod cars hummed around the track for six appallingly boring hours. The crowd, numbered in the single digits, had about as much fun as spectators at the infamous U.S. Grand Prix at Indianapolis dissected herein last month by editor Csaba Csere in his column. The harsh fact is that outside NASCAR (a series based not on automobiles but on the personalities of the drivers), racing crowds are down in America and television ratings are in the low single digits. The IRL-Champ Car struggle and the Grand American-ALMS rivalry have done terrible damage, as have the insanely escalating costs of racing of all kinds.

Even at the entry level, where short-track oval racing, amateur sports-car competition, drag racing, etc., should be affordable, engine and chassis costs are off the Richter scale. Even a weekend racer can face $25,000 engines and budget-wrecking tire bills.

At some point the so-called moguls of the sport had better sit down and seek a solution. The clock is ticking.